Summary

Episode Title: Fit for Purpose

Guest: Danielle Duell, CEO of People With Purpose

What does it really mean for a business to be purpose-led? In this episode, we sit down with Danielle Duell, founder of People With Purpose, to explore how clarity of purpose can transform everything—from strategy and governance to employee engagement and long-term resilience.

Danielle shares powerful examples from brands like Kellogg’s, McDonald’s, and Tesla, and breaks down the difference between having a purpose statement and being a truly purpose-led organization. We dig into how purpose helps businesses navigate uncertainty, why it matters for decision-making, and what it looks like to design a business model that creates value for all stakeholders—not just shareholders.

We also touch on:

• The connection between purpose and ESG (and why Danielle calls it FESG)

• How to spot a purpose that’s more PR than real

• What happens when a CEO isn’t on board

• The role of purpose in complex ecosystems

• And how asking the right questions—like “What value do we destroy, and for whom?”—can be a catalyst for deep change

This is an episode for leaders, changemakers, and anyone rethinking how business can—and should—be a force for good.

Transcript

Danielle Duell – The Power of Purpose

Rob Brodnick: Welcome to the Positive Turbulence Podcast. Stories from the periphery. I’m Rob Rodnick.

Karyn Zuidinga: And I’m Karyn Zuidinga. This episode we’re getting to the heart of business, purpose. Not the slogan on the wall kind of purpose, but the kind that transforms how organizations think, act, and show up in the world.

Rob Brodnick: We are joined by Danielle Duell, CEO, and founder of People With Purpose, a consulting firm that helps businesses become truly purpose led. Danielle brings a wealth of experience and conviction to the idea that businesses can and should make the world better. Not worse. In this conversation, Danielle challenges us to think differently about what makes a business resilient, authentic, and sustainable. She also shares how purpose creates positive turbulence by realigning strategy, governance, and even culture.

Karyn Zuidinga: If you’ve ever wondered how to make strategy meaningful, how to engage stakeholders in a shared why, or how to lead through chaos with clarity, you’ll wanna stick around. 

Rob Brodnick: The Positive Turbulence Podcast is brought to you by a AMI an innovation learning community that is celebrating 40 years of supporting innovation and creativity for organizations and individuals. Learn more at aminnovation.org.

Also would like to thank Mack Avenue Music Group as a contributing sponsor to hear our theme song, Late Night, Sunrise, and other great music. Visit mackavenue.com. I.

Karyn Zuidinga: This is Danielle Duell, CEO And founder of People with Purpose. So, what is People with Purpose and why should I care about purpose?

Danielle Duell: Thanks, Karyn. People With Purpose is a specialized consulting business that focuses on purpose- led business. That’s all we do. We work with CEOs and executive teams and boards primarily to help them along with their team and stakeholders to design a purpose for their organization, are beyond just making profit.

But we assume that profit is obviously part of the it’s an outcome of a good business model, but it’s not the core reason for being. And then once we’ve helped them define the purpose, we then work with them to develop an enterprise strategy to bring that purpose to life and make it happen.

So that ends up with a strategic plan.

And then some new measurements on how to measure progress and success in terms of fulfilling the purpose. A lot of organizations still measuring success in financial terms, and then they’re doing some ESG metrics that sit off to the side.

But in truly purpose-led businesses, the whole business model is structured around the core intention of delivering on the purpose. And so the metrics of purpose-led businesses are all integrated.

Karyn Zuidinga: For our listeners who don’t know what ESG is, that stands for Environment, social and Governance? Yes.

Danielle Duell: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. So it’s certainly somewhat still an emerging field, but soon to become a big compliance issue for organizations around the world in terms of how they report to shareholders to regulators, to other stakeholders on , the impact of their business.

Not just in financial terms, but, and certainly what we’re finding now is that I guess company valuations and future value is not just being evaluated on financial performance and assets and liabilities, but there’s also an evaluation of future risk in terms of value being destroyed in terms of environmental, social and other government governance type risks like trust and so forth. 

Karyn Zuidinga: Wow.

There’s a whole lot to unpack there, but I wanna back it up or, and just ask a little bit about purpose and businesses without purpose. Like it feels to me if I look at, think about the opposite. Don’t all businesses have a purpose?

Danielle Duell: question. Some businesses still are created just to make as much profit as possible at all costs. And the proportion of businesses that exist in the world with that as their primary reason for being has diminished a lot in the last 10 years in particular. In Australia we have the Australian Stock Exchange, the top 100 companies in Australia, about half of them have a purpose now. Whereas a decade ago, that percentage was much lower

Karyn Zuidinga: I’m a little bit, whoa, only half and that’s better than it was a decade ago.

Danielle Duell: Oh yeah, that’s right. The purpose is an organization’s why do we exist? What impact do we wanna make? And. Many organizations now have a purpose statement, but that doesn’t make them a purpose led business.

Karyn Zuidinga: Right.

Danielle Duell: Just because you’ve got some words that say, here’s a nice intention that looks good to the outside world, doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the way the business is led or operated and so forth.

And I guess what we’re seeing now and why it really matters is that your ability as an organization to create revenue in the long term hinges upon your ability to create value in the long term. And I know both of you are systems thinkers, and when we think about a system, if you are depleting one part of the system or the, participant in that ecosystem isn’t getting its needs met, it’ll move to another ecosystem or it’ll die. 

So in the business world, if we aren’t remunerating, our employees fairly many of them will look for other opportunities or or if we’re exploiting our suppliers, they will try and find better customers or they, if we are polluting our environment, ultimately those resources we depend upon to create our products and services will run out.

And so therefore and actually probably even more tangibly in today’s world because of the of what technology has enabled the transparency of our operations. Threatens reputation quite quickly. And the power of the consumer, the community member, the employee, them to spotlight core practices, can threaten an organization’s reputation.

It can erode trust very quickly which becomes a big risk, that, that becomes a threat to durable returns. So I guess what I often say to the purpose skeptics and the pure, capitalists is say, if you want to create durable shareholder returns, the best thing you can do is take a purpose-led approach, which considers all of the stakeholders in your business’ ecosystem and to design a business model that creates fair value for all of those stakeholders so that they want to keep participating in your business model.

Because it’s working for them. And as long as all of the stakeholders in an ecosystem, are largely content, then it can continue on into perpetuity. Obviously that’s a very simplified view and it’s it’s dynamic and we’re on the Positive Turbulence podcast, so you know all about that.

But I guess that’s where purpose comes in as well, because regardless of the turbulence an individual or an organization faces, clarity of purpose helps put the positive into positive turbulence because with that clarity, you bring a a design mindset and an intentionality around how might we create value in these circumstances purposefully. So how might we deliver on our purpose in these circumstances? And so that actually helps us behave as sense makers in that chaos, in that uncertainty and so forth. And actually in talking with boards and executives, that’s one of the things that I find they relate to most. We are all facing so much uncertainty that when we have clarity of purpose, it actually simplifies it, the decision making process.

So it helps us as leaders think how might we deliver on our purpose even though our, a south supply agreement into that country is currently suspended, or our workforce, half of our workforce has COVID and can’t get to the warehouse or inflation has gone up so much so that our core consumer can no longer afford to buy our product.

Karyn Zuidinga: Talk to me about that. Like gimme for instance I love these examples, but talk to me about the decision making. So I’m a, I don’t know. I don’t know what the I think you probably had a business in your mind where you’re giving us some of those examples, right? Some of those, a few businesses in your mind.

So you’re that business owner, you know your purpose, and now you’re struck with some calamity.

Talk to me about how having your purpose in mind or being very clear on it, helps you through that calamity.

Danielle Duell: It’s funny, the thing that’s come to my mind is , I’m hosting a webinar this afternoon with some of our clients in Africa and Australia. The topic is your purpose fit for purpose?

And and it’s along the lines of you’ve got a purpose statement that, but is it helping you? Is it helping you make decisions? And I’m not sure I’m gonna use this in the webinar today, but I was doing some research on Kellogg’s, which is a brand obviously well known in the US.

And when I first founded People with Purpose back in 2014, Kellogg’s is purpose, was nourishing families so they can flourish and thrive. So nourishing families so they can flourish and thrive. And I used to share a, like a range of purpose statement examples with our clients when we were helping them to design their purpose statement to show them, the good and the bad and the better. And and I asked them, which statement did they like most and why? And quite often, Kellogg’s was the one they liked least. And yeah. And the issue that came up most frequently was two things. One was that it sounded like marketing duff nourish and flourish, like a little rhyme thing.

But but the thing that really grated on people was this idea of claiming to nourish families when many of the products were so high in sugar and 

Rob Brodnick: Sugar cereal is what 

Danielle Duell: Yeah, 

Rob Brodnick: right? You’re like, wait a second. Nourish and families. 

Danielle Duell: Yeah, That’s right. And so it’s interesting I happened to check back on that this week in in building out this webinar.

And their purpose now is creating better days and a place at the table for everyone through our trusted food brands now. So I’ll say it again, creating better days and a place at the table for everyone through our trusted food brands. So it’s a bit long-winded, but you can see how they’ve shifted to something they can deliver on.

So if you are a 7-year-old kid that gets to eat cocoa Pops or fruit Loops or whatever it’s called in the us, that’s what they’re called here. In some ways that does create a better day. I remember on the, occasions I’d let my kids eat that they were excited. It’s like it was a treat. It was something fun for them in that.

And when I look at the phrase and a place at the table. I think there’s some lovely meaning, like double meaning and metaphor around that in terms of products that are inclusive and accessible, but also around the real life symbolism of having a seat at the table in your family home and all that sort of thing.

And they’ve literally said for everyone, so they’re mass market, that’s clear. So this is a long-winded answer to your question, Karyn, around decision making for organizations. So I don’t know, I have never spoken to the execs of Kellogg’s, but I figured they probably got the same feedback on their purpose at some point and realize, hey this nourishing family’s piece isn’t necessarily authentic.

So what are our options? Do we get rid of the products that aren’t nourishing and zone in on health and nourishing, or do we say no to that? Which obviously they, they did say no to that and focus on mass products that do bring a bit of joy but in ways that they can trust our brands ’cause they’re safe to eat in terms of you’re not gonna there’s sort of meeting quality standards, they’re not gonna get poisoned. And there’s something inclusive about that. I think that’s interesting. And to contrast that with another brand that you may not consider to be purposeful, but also very well known is McDonald’s. So McDonald’s isn’t claiming to nourish people. Their purpose is to feed and foster communities.

So you do get a feed from McDonald’s. It’s quite predictable. If you’re hungry, you get fed. But when you jump onto their website and have a look at their purpose and values and actually they’ve got a page that’s our purpose and impact. They are authentically demonstrating what they’re doing to foster communities as well in the way that they develop their supply chain and that they invest back into the community and what they’re doing for their workforce and so forth.

I think a big part about purpose is is the authenticity piece. And in fact, it’s a big risk for organizations to promise something that they’re not. They’ll actually erode more value than what could possibly create, be created 

Karyn Zuidinga: Right. 

Danielle Duell: by promising something.

Karyn Zuidinga: Yeah. Talk to me just for a second. Just the few mechanics and then we’ll get a little more ecosystem-y, I, I see Rob just waiting to go.

Rob Brodnick: I’m doing great. 

Karyn Zuidinga: get talk to me about the intersection between purpose and ESG when, like the examples you’ve provided so far are. Overtly, ESG they might be tangentially.

So on the social side, maybe, but I’m certainly not hearing a lot of environment or governance in those two statements, really. And so where does that play into this whole thing? Like why is there such this strong I can intuit why there’s such a strong tie, but tell me a little bit more about that.

Danielle Duell: The intersection between Purpose and ESG, I actually think it should be called FESG. And the intersection between Purpose, financial and environmental, social and governance. And I think one of the challenges is that it’s been siloed. It’s we’ve brought in ESG on top of your financial reporting requirements, 

Rob Brodnick: box checked, 

Danielle Duell: yeah.

tick. Yeah I think the intersection between purpose and ESG is that purpose is the superordinate goal, and it’s like a holistic intention around how you create value that considers the net positive. So how might we design a business model that creates optimal economic. Value optimal environmental value, optimal social value simultaneously then govern that business in an ethical, efficient and sustainable way or durable way, I should say, as well.

Not to confuse the two terms I don’t know, is that clear enough? Karyn? Do you wanna me a bit harder?

Karyn Zuidinga: I the thought I had first of all, I thought that it was interesting that you put purpose as this kind of super structure around all this stuff. Whereas a lot of, some people I know might have flipped it might’ve put ESG and purpose somehow below that, right? That ESG is the super goal.

So that I thought was really interesting. Oh, that’s a really interesting perspective. And then I started to think about, okay so how does, I have a friend who’s off on a, say Vision Quest. Not that a strategic,

Rob Brodnick: gonna say vision.

Karyn Zuidinga: but he is off, he’s off on a strategic retreat this week with this company, and they’re, working out the strategy.

So I started to think about okay, but how do you do strategy when you don’t have purpose? And how do you do, how do maybe ESG becomes your purpose, but I wonder if that, if, you could, you will have had a window onto this. What happens when you start doing something like strategy or ESG with no purpose or no clear purpose, or maybe, a purpose of making a lot of money, which isn’t really a purpose at all.

How do what happens when you’re doing that? What’s the system look like?

Danielle Duell: I guess that’s the system we’ve come to fix at People with Purpose. We don’t do strategy that way. We work with a lot of clients that have never had a purpose statement until we’ve worked with them. So we’ve seen their strategies beforehand, which are generally about opportunity led innovation rather than purpose led innovation or or survival led innovation.

Like how do we remain relevant? How do we not lose market share? How do we gain another 10%? How do we do 10% better than the previous year? And that’s chaotic. It’s very difficult to allocate resources that way. You see a lot of misalignment in executives and the KPIs and the battle for resources and 

Rob Brodnick: bet making strategic choices just becomes a, a paradox in one sense. If you’re not guided

to a certain extent. 

Danielle Duell: Yeah. Yeah, so I think having a purpose, actually Tesla is quite a good example. It’s their purpose is to accelerate the world’s transition to renewable energy. I know Elon Musk is a controversial character in a lot of ways, but if you use that business as an example, with that purpose, they had options on how to accelerate the world’s transition.

Now, one option was to disrupt the car or the vehicle market and make electric vehicles accessible and sexy. Which certainly I think in my neighborhood where like the 10th highest Tesla penetration in the country, it’s suburb or something like that. So it’s catching on here, but but they’ve also 

got, 

Karyn Zuidinga: of places in the world, right?

Danielle Duell: yeah, and and, but they’ve also, really invested into battery technology for, other power sources and so forth.

You can see with a good purpose like that, like it, their purpose wasn’t to be the world’s leading electric vehicle business, which is what maybe a similar organization would’ve done in the eighties, 1980s for those born more recently. So that’s the difference between having a purpose motive or probably like more of a profit motive to be the biggest and the best and the first. But it’s really about driving useful change. I guess that’s a big part of what purpose is.

Rob Brodnick: I imagine one of the advantages of purpose and I’m thinking about how we engage people within an organization or, out outside or across many organizations, that purpose is more attractive from a human perspective. If our organizations were machines, we could have goals and quotas and all those kind of phrases where we could direct things towards a number. But with purpose it makes me think about belonging.

Danielle Duell: Oh Yeah.

Rob Brodnick: And so the impact on the human relations, human engagement side of an organization is there an advantage there? Is that one of the ways that purpose helps?

Danielle Duell: Indeed it’s one of the the big, actually, it’s really been a big driver for a lot of organizations, particularly post pandemic, to get clear on their purpose because they, their workforce has been literally thinking, why am I here and not somewhere else, it’s been a huge driver and obviously long before the pandemic as well, and there’s heaps of research that goes back, or, even, I think 2009 Daniel Pink published Drive the surprising truth around what motivates us.

And his summary of all the research on human motivation at that time concluded that what people are longing for, what really motivates them is autonomy, mastery, and purpose. And so that with purpose being that. Sense of feeling that we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. And my husband and I have got, five kids in their twenties and their way of choosing a career has been, quite different to ours, which was, much more serendipitous and, grateful just to have a job or, and put a head down and try and progress.

They’ve been quite deliberate and literally switching careers. I think almost all of them have switched career already 

I put my head down for 10 years straight in my first job and my husband did something similar, what we’re finding is that to attract and retain talent, many people are looking at the organization’s purpose and does that align with what I believe in?

Do I do I wanna, in Tesla’s example, do I wanna help accelerate the world’s transition to renewable energy? Do I wanna feed and foster communities?

How do I reconcile working for a brand like McDonald’s? Yeah. And it also, there, there’s heaps of research as well about how it improves employee wellbeing and so you know, that positive self image and engagement, and then the correlation between engagement and positive business outcomes like productivity less absenteeism, less workplace incidents, higher customer satisfaction. Yeah, higher productivity and so on. There’s decades of research on that already.

Rob Brodnick: Yeah I think 20 years ago. Working with organizations around strategy and other things. Like one of the tools I often use was shared vision. And

We might all see the same destination or be going in the same direction. You’re on the railroad tracks the wrong way. Wait a second. The vision, it’s over here.

And that was great because, vision statements prior to that Pepsi’s “beat Coke”, they were just competitive, like reframing some kind of competitive position where visions they, they got a little further. But I see purpose being even stronger in a sense because not only are we moving in the same direction or to the same place, but it’s like, where do I fit? How do I belong? 

Danielle Duell: Yeah. Absolutely. And I think I think one of the challenges that we have around purpose is language or the words we use. Because some people, many people still think purpose, vision, and mission are the same thing. But there are differences. And in, in our view at People with Purpose, the purpose is the why.

The vision is a picture and words of what the future will look like with the purpose fulfilled. In our case, our purpose why we exist is to equip business to improve the world. And our sort of longer term vision is that within our lifetime, having a purpose led strategy, it becomes as ubiquitous as a profit and loss statement.

That, that’s just, everyone does that. And so everyone’s thinking about how we can make profit purposefully. We can have a vision a year from now, 10 years from now, a hundred years from now and so forth. So visions can be timestamped. But the purpose, the same purpose can endure for all of that time.

And then the mission is more like what we do. What are we actually doing? Or how are we doing it to deliver on that purpose? And so a decade ago our, how we delivered on the purpose of equipping business to improve the world, one of our most popular products was to go into board rooms and educate company directors on the power of purpose and the business case for purpose.

Actually, I think that’s what it was called. The two hour workshop we did with the executives on the literal strategic business benefits of being a purpose led business because there was much more skepticism and ignorance at that time because we were all just so focused on making profit.

So our purpose is still the same as it was 10 years ago. We were spending most of our time helping organizations develop purpose statements because they didn’t have purpose statements. But now about half, organizations have one. And so most of our work now is helping them develop the strategy to deliver on the purpose, purpose, refreshing the strategy and like accountability processes to report on it, and how can we do it better? And operational planning to cascade that through the business and leadership coaching to coach the leaders to manage the transition from for profit to purposeful profit. So you can see how, even if people with purpose survives me 500 years, I would still like to think that there will be opportunities to equip business to keep improving the world. 500 years from now and the products and services can evolve.

Rob Brodnick: It’s a mindset shift, isn’t it? Moving from the rudimentary directed towards goals and outcomes to, to trying to come together around shared vision to eventually then, having the purpose led mindset.

Danielle Duell: Yeah, definitely. It’s a it’s a design decision. I think in a lot of ways. It’s how do we want to design our business model or refine our business model? Or how might we to, create purposeful value rather than your question earlier, Karyn how do we design our strategy to make more profit? And it’s not an either or, it’s an, and, how do we. Design our strategy to deliver on our purpose and be profitable.

Karyn Zuidinga: So where does someone begin? So I’m sold now, right? I, yes. Purpose. That’s what we need.

Rob Brodnick: How do you get there and how do you pick the right one and 

Karyn Zuidinga: And how do you like, and how do you make something that’s unique to you, right? Oh, Tesla’s purpose sounds great. We’ll just take that one. I feel like that’s not really a good plan.

Danielle Duell: No. I think authenticity is one of the key things, so where do you start? In an organizational setting. It’s critical that the CEO wants to lead a purpose-led business That, that he or she is also sold. Karyn. Because if the CEO isn’t on board it, it rarely works.

Karyn Zuidinga: If you’re that person who’s working for somebody who’s not aligned with that idea, then really what you’re saying is maybe you need to find somebody who is

Danielle Duell: Yeah, exactly. Or evaluate whether it’s worthwhile working on your CEO bit and bringing them on the journey.

Karyn Zuidinga: You’re the CEO of, company X, Y, Z, and you’re like, okay, you got me. I’m convinced we need a purpose. 

Danielle Duell: Obviously you would want a board that is at least has a higher degree of trust in the CEO and is preferably on, on board or has that high trust and is curious and open to looking at it this way that’s really helpful. If they’re not on board, that can be quite problematic.

Karyn Zuidinga: Wait a minute. Board, I, in my head I was following along on the narrative and what I inserted was senior leadership within the companies, all the Veeps, and I was like, wait a minute. She went to board.

Tell me about that and that’s the first place that you’re going. Oh, they’re not aligned. Interesting. Tell me about

Danielle Duell: yeah. That’s the g the governance piece, Karyn. And so certainly in the governance context of Australia and the clients that we work with across the world. It’s the board’s role to approve strategy and, and then for the executive to implement the strategy. So if the board is not behind the strategy and supportive of the strategy and the metrics that are used to measure the success of the strategy, then that can disrupt and distract the executive.

So it’s really, I guess that that accountability and authority that can derail the activities below. So it, I think the relationship between CEO and chair in particular is quite important and engaging the board in the process. The CEO generally has the authority to get the rest of the veeps on board.

And if not to do something about it. But the CEO generally doesn’t have the power to, create a board refresh.

Rob Brodnick: maybe I hate

to be like a Monday morning quarterback about

Danielle Duell: No, go for it. Challenge 

Rob Brodnick: purpose is so strong in the CEO that every employee says we quit because

we’re not aligned, that’s power in purpose right there. 

Danielle Duell: Absolutely. And certainly that should, that should be part of the purpose design process that you would get the input from your stakeholders.

And actually, I was talking to one of our clients yesterday who used to work for a bank and now she heads up quite a large charity here. So she was one of the veeps in this previous business, and she was involved in a purpose design process that by the time it came back from the CEO and the board, it didn’t reflect any of the stakeholder input and it completely fell flat because it was, tokenistic engagement, which which does more harm than good if you are asking your people for their feedback and then you don’t use it, it doesn’t go that well does it, in terms of trying to implement something.

The purpose design process should definitely involve as many of your stakeholders as possible. And typically at a minimum, we would say all staff all management, all board a viable number of customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders.

And that engagement can be captured practically and economically through online survey and other forums or existing feedback mechanisms with some additional, targeted questions and so forth. I guess at a board and management level, two very good questions to ask are, how do we create value and for whom and how might we create value and for whom? Because. The clues as to why your organization might exist beyond just making a profit are in how you create value and how you might create value through the capabilities and resources and so forth that you have access to or that you could assemble and also what your prevailing values and beliefs are a culture in the business. So what’s important to you?

Karyn Zuidinga: The first thing that popped into my head when you said how do we create value and for whom? The first thing I thought about was. Not so much finding that, but sometimes organizations, if it’s too big, right? So if you, I can’t remember off the top of my head the Tesla purpose statement, but that’s huge. And that may or may not, but when Tesla started out, maybe it was accessible to them or maybe it became more accessible to them over time. So what do you do about the scale, of the purpose statement? How do you align that?

Danielle Duell: Yeah. Really good question. I think that needs to align with the ambition of the organization, which is obviously relative to the ambition of the leaders to some degree. And so a parallel example could be an energy company in Australia called CS Energy that we worked with I don’t know for the first time, I can’t remember how many years ago.

It was, it maybe five, five to 10 years ago. And. They were a energy wholesaler. So they were running coal fired electricity power plants. And the life of those plants only had another 15 years. They had hundreds of employees. And and the global context is that coal powered electricity is bad.

So they had issues in attracting and retaining a workforce to an industry that was not something people could say with pride. I work from, this kind of company however we all wanna charge our iPhones overnight and, so forth. So there’s a pragmatic reality that we still needed that energy but then the company also looking to the future wanted to, I guess provide a brightness of future for its workforce and and a future for the organization. So we worked with them to develop a purpose statement that we call an ambidextrous purpose and an ambidextrous purpose led strategy.

And what that ended up being was to deliver energy today and power your tomorrow. So what that purpose statement did was galvanize the workforce and the leadership and the board around we’ve got a job to do. We still gotta deliver energy today. And that is a important job to be done to deliver energy to the people in the state. But to power your tomorrow has multiple meanings. What does it mean to power your tomorrow? There will be no tomorrow if if we don’t create a tomorrow based on sustainable and renewable sources, there will be no tomorrow for our employees if we shut the plants down in 2032 and haven’t got an alternative employment for them the revenue of the company will decline if there are not alternative revenue streams nurtured in that period. And so what that actually enabled was a lot of purpose-led innovation. 

 

Danielle Duell: So how might we create value and for whom in the context of powering your Tomorrow? And so they they, explored. Renewables options and hydro scheme and partnerships with energy retailers and so forth.

That purpose statement, which they still have actually they’re, and a couple of CEOs later. It’s not as grandiose as accelerating the world’s transition to renewable energy as Tesla’s, but it’s still a really meaningful and actionable purpose for them that will certainly last at least for another decade or more.

Rob Brodnick: I’ve got a super loaded question. full disclosure, and it is partially because it’s something that I think Karyn and I are struggling with. We’re learning how to apply. So maybe you could give us some insight. The question is, we’ve been using purpose a lot with our ecosystem work ecosystems and the way we’re approaching it are sometimes larger than an organization where an organization is one of the many. Parts of an ecosystem, or it’s much smaller than an organization. And if you think like the ecosystem of something within an organization, it’s its own ecosystem. It’s that whole, nested Russian doll thing, 

Danielle Duell: Yeah. 

Rob Brodnick: but purpose applies wherever you go.

And it’s been helpful. And the way we characterize how healthy an ecosystem is relative to its fit to purpose. Is it producing the results? Aligned with the purpose.

And so we, when we define an ecosystem, we look at a particular purpose and we come to agreement and then we start to model what does the ecosystem fit. Ha. Have you used I know you mentioned where you bring stakeholders from outside an organization and they may participate in purpose creation.

Have you ventured into the multi organization ecosystem where they might have a aligned or singular purpose or even within an organization, have you flexed the use of purpose in other directions? Curious about that.

Danielle Duell: Yeah, that’s a great great question. Few thoughts have popped to mind for me because a number of our clients are member-based organizations. So industry bodies and like for example, in agriculture or economic development groups in a regions and so forth. So yes, there is, it’s really interesting harmonizing activities, 

Rob Brodnick: I love that word harmonizing. That’s a great word choice.

Danielle Duell: In those sort of multi participant ecosystems, the systems within a system and so forth. We haven’t I guess our engagements have still been with, one of the entities not necessarily invoked by multiple participants to help us define our purpose for this ecosystem, which we all identify as belonging to. I think the other thing that came to mind while you were asking that question, Rob, was around what we measure. So you said, you and Karyn said, how well is this ecosystem delivering on its purpose? Or something along those lines. Did I phrase 

Rob Brodnick: Yeah. Fit to purpose. is what we’re, yeah. 

Danielle Duell: Yeah. So is this ecosystem fit for purpose?

And so I think that’s where I think that’s where the measures are really important. I was just thinking about another one of our clients, FSD Africa. So they’re a financial sector development agency that’s somewhat funded by the UK government to intervene in the capital markets where the market fails. And so it wouldn’t survive on its own. So it needs intervention . And the purpose that we’ve helped them develop is to make finance work for Africa’s future. And so what they’re doing is they’re investing in green finance interventions and, gender inclusion in the economy and things like that.

So that’s a big ecosystem, right? Lot a lot’s going on there. Hopefully FSD Africa is playing a role of being, creating positive turbulence for all the participants in the African economy and society and environment. So there’s measures that FSD Africa can put in place to see is finance working for Africa’s future?

And there’s, lead indicators and lag indicators in terms of, where is the money moving, who is participating what’s the quality of life it, are there movements improvement in that and so forth. So I think that’s where, yeah, what we measure really matters.

Rob Brodnick: We’ve come upon the and you mentioned it earlier, which actually made me think about this question, but. The value exchanges that occur across all the entities in this ecosystem are really the glue that holds it together. And for every value exchange, you can pick a metric and put a pressure valve on it and measure which way it’s going. But there’s the conundrum of perceived and expected value. And, why am I here? I expect this, what’s being delivered to me? What consistently keeps appearing across all these more healthy ecosystems is this fit to purpose and the perception of value that’s being created along it. Really different view of how a system works than maybe the, give me your org chart and your spreadsheets and I’ll, your bottom line, and I’ll let you know how healthy you are. 

Danielle Duell: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Yeah. And look, I think the follow up questions to those questions I mentioned earlier in terms of how do we create value and for whom and how might we create value and for whom. And these are the ones that not far less organizations step into these questions as how do we destroy value and for whom and how might we unintentionally destroy value and for whom?

And so how are we destroying it now? And how else might we destroy it in the future if we’re not careful? And I think that’s where I think that’s where it just takes that purpose led strategy to the next level when you are consciously having conversations around who’s worse off because our business exists.

Rob Brodnick: That’s negative turbulence, right?

Danielle Duell: Yeah. And, but what are we prepared to do about, 

Karyn Zuidinga: yeah. Yeah. Just, we’ve had so many conversations over the last few years about, supply chain, for instance, right? And where that stuff is coming from, and the weighing of the lithium battery versus the. The, driving a gasoline powered vehicle, is that, all of that, that all falls under those kind of questions, right?

What are the negative impacts

Danielle Duell: Yeah. That’s right. And I am, I’m a more positively biased person. I like to orient my thoughts to the positive. But it is helpful to stop and think around, hang on a second. There’s very few businesses that don’t have some negative impacts and and we’re not done until we also try and address those and make them better.

And again, it’s a design decision because if you’re not even stopping to think about that or admit that, or you’re trying to smooth over that and just show that the good ESG checklist that we’ve ticked off you might actually miss the biggest opportunity to create value yet. 

Karyn Zuidinga: Yeah. Yeah. Because there may be hidden opportunities in there that you hadn’t even considered yet. So just coming back down to some practicalities, so I’m the CEO I’m convinced we, we’ve got the board on board. I’ve rallied the veeps. We’re good.

Danielle Duell: yeah. Yeah.

Karyn Zuidinga: Now we’re starting to, workshop the ideas and think about it and stuff is getting thrown at the wall.

How do I know when we’ve hit upon a good purpose statement or, and somebody is saying we’ll just use Teslas right, or whatever. Or we’ll just take Teslas and we’ll just change it a little bit. How do I know, like, how can I guide my people through that moment?

Danielle Duell: yeah. Thank you. So we’ve developed some design principles for purpose statements over the years and we call them the why a BI principles. So obviously a purpose must be about why not what and how. So it needs to be at the, at set, at that right level. And then a BI is we’ve got a bunch of A words.

A bunch of I words. And the B is, it’s gotta be brief. Like it has to be memorable, a clear purpose statement. It’s not like the old days where we had a two page mission or vision statement back in the eighties where we’ll be the best in the world and maximize shareholder returns and make sure no one gets hurt.

Rob Brodnick: That’s what they all said. 

Danielle Duell: how inspiring. So yeah, so being brief some of the a words include action oriented and some of the eye words include impact. So action and impact are two kind of key ones. I won’t go into all of those now, but so firstly we’d run it through the design criteria because what happens when you involve a whole range of different people in wordsmithing, I’m sure you’ve been there yourselves, and many of your listeners will have participated in some of those sessions.

And it’s, it can be quite tedious. People think they’ve gotta come up with a slogan or something, and it’s actually, no it’s really about designing a statement that can be used as the filter for decision making into perpetuity for that organization. And having those design principles helps automatically self-select out some of the suggestions that are fit for purpose.

So then we would look at that statement. And, the sequence of this can vary by organization but one thing we would do is look at the key stakeholders for that business and say, all right what does, what’s the inherent meaning of this purpose to each stakeholder?

What does it mean? Because maximizing shareholder returns as a purpose is clearly attractive to shareholders but less so to other stakeholders. Whereas in purpose-led organizations, the purpose actually should be meaningful and valuable to all stakeholders. So what does it mean if you’re the shareholder? What does it mean if you’re the CEO? What does it mean if you’re an employee, a customer, a family member of an employee, a supplier, someone living in the community where the business operates? So on. So looking at all those stakeholders and is there stakeholder specific value there? So that’s one of the other value checks. And then as the CEO Karyn. And with your leadership team and with your board, you’d be testing out this purpose statement options with some questions. What could we say yes to with a purpose like this?

Karyn Zuidinga: Oh, that’s good.

Danielle Duell: Yeah. What could we say yes to? Because this statement has to endure in decades into the future.

So can we imagine product innovations that go beyond our current products and service line that would enable us to further this purpose? So a bit like what I was saying earlier, we started out trying to educate boards on the business case for it into the future. We, who knows what we might be doing?

We might be purely coaching leaders and creating purpose dashboards that are automated or who knows, but it could evolve. And simultaneously, what should we say no to with this purpose? And do we feel comfortable excluding that from our options into the future, including some of the things that we’re doing now.

I often in my readings, the CVS health example of when they banned cigarettes years ago in line with their purpose that was a big decision of something that that pharmacy brand excluded. It cost them a lot of revenue initially. But in the long run, they were able to rebuild that value.

But that’s an example of a business using their intentions, their purpose to be clear about what they need to say no to. We’re gonna be about health. How can we in good conscience include cigarettes in our product suite?

Those are two two really good things to do. And then we get to see where the appetite is. So we go back to the Kellogg’s example. Oh obviously they weren’t prepared to to scrap high sugar cereals. So they needed to choose a purpose statement that could, they could still authentically deliver.

Rob Brodnick: It makes me think of the word integrity and where pure capitalism has a singular drive and everyone knows, you get that, but around purpose, a business is sticking your neck out a little bit. If we say, Hey here is our purpose. Here’s how we want you to view us. It holds them a little more accountable, I think. To drop the unhealthy product line if they say they have a health healthy purpose statement. So I think it, it changes the equation pretty significantly.

Danielle Duell: Yeah, definitely. I think there are lots of examples, and I think the CVS one is a good one. I’ve read it in a number of articles, maybe in George Serafin from Harvard’s book, Profit and Purpose as well. I think I think it might have been featured in there. How in the short run they, their their profits declined in their very, in a few years their profits and their business valuation had increased and and rates of smoking also declined.

Which is huge, right? So that’s not just their business model. That’s the purposeful impact that goes, that, that is, you know, bigger than the business then, which is terrific.

Rob Brodnick: Is there a big wave out there? And let me clarify what I mean by that. And I’m

thinking about 

Danielle Duell: talking climate 

Rob Brodnick: big wave. No, not yet. But with. Millennials, gen Z. I do a lot of work in higher ed and graduates looking for jobs, making choices about which company to align with, or even teenagers thinking about what my life is gonna be like. And everything I’ve read and heard about, and I think it comes through from conversations with 18 to 25 year olds, is I want to connect to the purpose of the organization. I don’t know, I don’t care if it’s the highest paying job

Danielle Duell: Mm-hmm. 

Rob Brodnick: sure about, but that if there’s alignment there I get an attraction.

Are you saying that generationally, what, the big wave, what’s happening from the various generations over time? Is that resonating with the work you’re doing?

Danielle Duell: It is, I guess I, I’m just cautious around, saying that it is a generational thing because I think it’s all generations. I’m not sure if you’ve seen Chip Conley’s work in the model, modern elder ACA Academy chip’s one, got a hospitality background was in Airbnb, and and he, yeah he’s talking about purpose with people who are, 50, 60, 70 and beyond.

I think one of the one of the side effects of the longevity that we enjoyed today, compared to a hundred years ago is that we go beyond, the survival years of, becoming an adult, raising families, hustle, just to feed and house everyone. And then we do, many people in many parts of the world, and this is certainly not all parts of the world, but we get to enjoy a decade or two of pondering the meaning of life somewhat.

And I’m actually finding in our work that yes, the the younger generations are definitely much more conscious about purpose in their early career decision making than perhaps we were. And they’re less less risk averse than we were to giving up a good paying job without something else lined up necessarily to go based on their values or something more meaningful or something that.

That they really feel a a sense of belonging to, but I, that’s not exclusive to them. And in fact, many of the CEOs that we work with who are in their fifties and sixties and seventies are themselves asking, thinking about legacy, thinking about meaning, thinking about impact, and how can I lead more purposefully?

How can I exit my career? How can I live out the, the rest of my working days and creating a meaningful impact not just more shareholder returns and not just, hitting our goals and looking successful on the outside, but stepping over all kinds of stakeholders to get there.

Rob Brodnick: I think you’re, you are positive turbulence.

You, your company, the work that you’re doing. Like when you bring purpose in, you’re disrupting the old style of organizational leadership and strategy. And I think it’s positive turbulence. ’cause it’s making things better.

It’s making the organization more sticky, more attractive, spreading their goals out more broadly. I it’s all good.

Karyn Zuidinga: Yeah. I think the questions, what. What do you say yes to? What do you say no to? Now? That’s to me where the heart of the turbulence lies.

Rob Brodnick: For sure.

Danielle Duell: It, it’s nice that you say that. Karyn, can I just just build on that that there’s. There’s research that shows how athletes that rehearse their race or their game over in their mind, perform better when it comes to race day. And I think, being a purposeful leader or leading a purpose led business gives you that kind of advantage because you are rehearsing in your mind what should we say yes or no to with a purpose like this?

What could we say yes or no to with a purpose like this? And one of my favorite quotes is, Louis Pasture’s Chance favors the prepared mind. And and I love that because, I’m one of those people that loves adventure and. Surprise and new experiences, but also likes to be very organized and planned and have a plan but not have to stick to it.

And so when you’re leading with a purposeful mindset, when chances come along, whether they’re good or bad, or turbulence comes along, whether it looks positive or negative in the first instance, a prepared mind or a purposeful mind can step into it and say, this is for me, or this is not for me.

And it’s really it’s a liberating way to live. Because all the little decisions are so much easier when you make the big decisions up front. There’s far less energy required and far less cleaning up to do afterwards because you’ve already made it clear. What’s important, what your intentions are, what impact you’re trying to make, what success looks like, what we would say yes or no to how we do things here.

Rob Brodnick: I love that quote. I was in a exercise one time. We had a, we were meeting people, we had to say. What our six word novel was that described us, and I chose that quote and someone nudged me and said, that’s only five words, Rob. Oh, go with it. Because that’s how I lead my life, so

Karyn Zuidinga: It 

Danielle Duell: Well, there you go. That’s probably why we’ve always 

gotten 

Rob Brodnick: right. 

Karyn Zuidinga: Danielle, I wanna make sure that we give you some time. We’ve got a few minutes to go. It’s passed so quickly. Is there 

anything

That we’re missing that we didn’t 

talk about today?

Danielle Duell: I’ve dedicated the last 10 years of my career and the next 10 years of my career to purpose-led business and the purpose of equipping business to improve the world. I really believe in the power of business to make the world better and not worse. And I think when I joined the workforce myself in 1992, I used to go to bed with my sales target on my roof in my bedroom.

And I thought that success was achieving those goals. but I didn’t see the impact that business could have. And, as an older person now that’s been in the workforce for over 30 years I really feel responsible for the choices that I make.

And I know that there’s many other leaders like me who want to use our talents and time in ways that don’t just make more money, but actually make the world better. And and so I guess one thought, we’ve talked a lot about purpose or organizational purpose. We’ve talked a lot about purpose led strategy.

But ultimately it all comes down to people with purpose as well. And you don’t have a purpose led business without people with purpose in within that business. And so we gently touched on it a little bit, but I think ultimately when people working for our organization can see the opportunity to contribute to that business, aligning with what’s important to them and what their own personal purpose is that’s the ultimate.

And we also work with organizations to help their people reflect on what their personal purpose is and what their opportunities are to live their own purpose in their organization.

Rob Brodnick: That makes a healthy ecosystem, right there.

Danielle Duell: Yeah, it does. It’s alignment. 

Rob Brodnick: I’m Inspired. I learned a lot too! 

Karyn Zuidinga: it’s gonna change how we approach purpose in our work, already, you’ve had a wonderful impact, Danielle. And with that, I just really wanna say thank you so much for taking the leap of faith, having this conversation with us today, giving us your time.

As Rob said, it’s been inspiring.

Danielle Duell: Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you. It’s been a real pleasure and I look forward to keeping in touch

Karyn Zuidinga: A huge thank you to AMI who have nurtured us in developing this podcast is the source of so many of our guests, and of course, the founder, Stan Gryskiewicz is also the author of the original book, and dare I say, the Daniel Pink of Positive Turbulence.

 

Rob Brodnick: AMI is a pioneering nonprofit organization comprised of committed individuals who foster and leverage creativity and innovation in organizations and society. AMI identifies leading edge innovation, shares, experiences, sponsors research, and recognizes innovation and creative processes. Find out more at aminnovation.org.

And thank you to Mack Avenue Music Group, our contributing sponsor for providing our podcast soundtrack Late Night Sunrise.

Karyn Zuidinga: Be sure to tune in next time to meet Chris Anderson of Vantem. Homes that fight climate change built faster at lower cost sound impossible? Chris is proving otherwise with modular tech that’s reshaping how we think about construction resilience and sustainability.

You can also head over to positive turbulence.com to find out more about us, get a transcript of this episode, get links to find out more about our guests or positive turbulence. Until next time, keep the turbulence positive!